Leave me the chasms of lost promises

Leave me the chasms of lost promises, the chaos, leave the gulf, leave nettle poison, rags.
Take everything.
I’ll be a mountain cave, live like a wolf
or crazed wild man, eyes full of suffering,
who cannot learn what love has always claimed
but longs to find it, unsheathed from the clasp
of someone who owns nothing, naked, maimed:
to give all for a dream beyond his grasp,
to die in peace, yet drink lifes bitterness,
to sieve pure song, full throated, out of thunder deep to sound the depths of woman’s innerness,
then perish on full lips, flesh ripped asunder
yet not be bound to earth by bony time, gripped by his own delusions,
he hears how the wind cries

These stubs of pain have shrivelled, since your ﬁre
has burned them out and what was left, their ash,
scattered on windswept water, and desire blistered on the ﬂickering of an eyelash, smudged, crumbled and dispersed — except for this,

Whatever self your substance might allow
has so unravelled, past analysis,
that what I was no longer matters now.

So, skittering, feeble, pitter-pattering heart,
although you seem past breaking, still you’ll beat on and on,
timekeeping for the voiceless part
that heralds this — and darling I that can’t retreat
to habitats of longing, well entrained
by those on whom your love have never rained who too lay in wait